Gang Life

On an unseasonably warm day in May 1997, Isaac Guillen marched in a stream of graduates to collect a diploma marking a new stage in his life: Juris Doctor. Beneath his gown were tattoos of barbed wire, reminding him of his violent younger days and the years he spent in juvenile lockup. This was the first time many of his friends and family had set foot on a college campus. Surrounded by a pearls and cashmere crowd, they cheered loudly for the triumph of one of their own. On stage at the UCLA commencement, a graduate crooned a Beatles tune: I know I'll never lose affection For people and things that went before I know I'll often stop and think about them Guillen, then 36, had struggled to escape a difficult past.

It was Father Gregory Boyle's first invitation to address the Los Angeles Police Commission, and he had something to get off his chest. For a quarter of a century, Boyle has steered boys and girls, and men and women, out of the gang life through Homeboy Industries, which offers job training, counseling, tattoo removal and more. The model Boyle built has been replicated around the country and abroad. Here in Los Angeles, some 120,000 gang members have voluntarily asked Father Boyle for help starting over.

Victory Outreach will present the play "Cold City Dreams," performed by former gang members who have experienced the violent reality of gang warfare. The drama, which has been performed throughout California, is intended to communicate a positive message to youths involved in gangs. There will be free performances today at Bassett High School, 755 N. Ardilla Ave., at 5 and 7 p.m.

There isn't a gang in Los Angeles that the new Fox crime drama "Gang Related" doesn't explore. Russian, Korean, Latino, African American, white and more are brought to vivid, bloody life over the course of the first season, which stars Ramon Rodriguez ("Battle Los Angeles," "The Wire") as Det. Ramon Rodriguez, an ex-gang member who is now part of the elite Los Angeles Gang Task Force. Ryan's past in the Los Angelicos gang is his secret, and it promises to be his undoing as he is forced to reconcile the demons of his past with the demons he fights in his present.

Leaders of Orange County's Vietnamese American community, like their counterparts in other ethnic groups, have wrestled with why youngsters join gangs and how to steer them away from crime. A new federally funded study may provide some assistance.

The halogen street lights blanched the dark brown wall of a downtown Santa Ana supermarket, turning it into an eerie shade of pale gray. The quarter-size pits that peppered the cement block were unmistakable. They were bullet holes. "Will you look at that," Police Sgt. Bill Scheer whispered as he inspected the damage, his squad car idling nearby. "There's another one!" Suddenly a chill came over us. We were in the middle of gang territory.

April 10, 1988 | GEORGE MILLER, Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez) is chairman of the House Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families. and

The epidemic of gang-related violence that has resulted in the deaths of more than 50 people in Los Angeles since the beginning of the year is shocking. Prepare for further shocks. In South-Central Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and other communities, armed warfare is becoming a common response to the irritations of daily life--business deals gone awry, arguments with family members, envy over a neighbor's new leather jacket or designer sunglasses.

A new and highly specialized gang has taken hold in Orange County, claiming turf in the heart of Irvine. They don't flash hand signs or wear baggy street clothes. In fact, one member sports a distinctly highbrow bow tie. But they have become a force bent on making their mark--at least within the occasionally cutthroat world of academia. This gang is composed of social scientists based at UC Irvine.

So many say that L.A. is unseen. Most likely because too many traverse the length and breadth of it at high speed or on the busy system of utilitarian roads built for economy. But for some who live the fast-forward life--those youths who see their ends at the very moments many others stand poised at the threshold of the future--slowing it down, basking in the details, becomes the mystery to unravel. Joseph Rodriguez's photographs are like a slow float down the wide boulevards that L.A.

Although gangs are all over the controversial new movie "Colors," the film isn't really about gangs. It's a cop movie that uses gang territory and the black community as a setting. Veteran cop Bob Hodges (Robert Duvall) might just as well have taught freshman cop Danny McGavin (Sean Penn) to calm down and stop being so arrogant on fraud detail or in the vice division. Would that he had.

What begins as a promising peek into the tragic cycle of waylaid promise that's crippling broken inner-city families is itself dispiritingly pulled sideways in the Baltimore-set indie "LUV. " When temporarily mom-less 11-year-old Woody (Michael Rainey Jr.) spends a day with his recently paroled Uncle Vincent (Common) as he tries to get a loan to set up his own business, the uncle's notions of manhood by example become distorted as his criminal past quickly intervenes. The problem is that co-writer-director Sheldon Candis' all-in-a-day construct -- the leap from a cheery morning visit to the bank to Woody being enlisted in a role-playing confrontation with gang members that night -- is hard to swallow.

Deliberating what punishment befitted the man before him, the judge mulled over the twists and turns in Isaac Guillen's 52 years of life. There was his induction into gang life at age 11, spending years in and out of juvenile lockup. He got himself off the streets and into UC Berkeley, then UCLA, graduating with a law degree and becoming a criminal defense attorney. Then came the choices that led him back to the wrong side of the law, doing the bidding of a powerful Mexican Mafia member.

On an unseasonably warm day in May 1997, Isaac Guillen marched in a stream of graduates to collect a diploma marking a new stage in his life: Juris Doctor. Beneath his gown were tattoos of barbed wire, reminding him of his violent younger days and the years he spent in juvenile lockup. This was the first time many of his friends and family had set foot on a college campus. Surrounded by a pearls and cashmere crowd, they cheered loudly for the triumph of one of their own. On stage at the UCLA commencement, a graduate crooned a Beatles tune: I know I'll never lose affection For people and things that went before I know I'll often stop and think about them Guillen, then 36, had struggled to escape a difficult past.

SAN DIEGO —Two members of a Mexican organized crime group that terrorized border communities were found guilty Wednesday of taking part in the strangling deaths of two men whose bodies were later dissolved in lye and dumped at a ranch outside San Diego. The mens' ruthless tactics were the trademark of a gang that broke off from the drug cartel waging war in Tijuana nearly a decade ago, according to prosecutors. The Palillos, or Toothpicks, came to the San Diego area in 2003 after splitting from the notorious Arellano Felix drug cartel.

When he was a kid, Hector Barrios used to vandalize walls. Then, he says, he realized he had "a passion for art" and a talent he "could incorporate onto paper instead. " Alex Diaz has been in a wheelchair since he was shot in the head 13 years ago. He didn't think of himself as an artist, but, he offers, "I always had a lot I wanted to say. " Both men, former gang members in their 30s, have found new ways to express themselves through Homeboy Industries' Exit Wounds Project, a workshop and art collaboration led by painter Nancy Baker Cahill.

They met when they were 7 years old, their houses 10 minutes apart if they ran the whole way -- both precocious and charismatic, both baseball fanatics, one a shortstop, the other a pitcher. Their friendship should have been simple. But as much as they might have seemed it, they knew from the start that they were not the same: Ronald "Looney" Barron and Tommie "T-Top" Rivers were from different "neighborhoods": two pockets of the city, one in Mid-Wilshire, one in West Adams, claimed by different gangs.

As a crowd of youngsters was held rapt, former gang member Jesse Soto, 36, described the pain and suffering gangs inflict not only on their communities but on their own members. While he spoke, pictures depicting corpses of young people flashed on a projection screen behind him, underscoring his point that "you're never too young to get shot at." Soto's appearance Wednesday was part of a program designed to steer elementary school students away from gangs and drugs.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced Thursday the creation of a city anti-gang academy to train and license intervention workers. The crucial component of L.A.'s anti-gang strategy was delayed for months because of conflicting visions for the school. The academy will be run by the Advancement Project, a legal advocacy, civil rights and public policy group, and funded in its inaugural year with $200,000 in federal grants. The city-sponsored academy will train all anti-gang workers involved with Villaraigosa's Office of Gang Reduction and Youth Development, which oversees $20 million in annual intervention and prevention contracts.

In parts of Prichard, Ala., children walk through broken glass and debris in bare feet. The roads, some unpaved, flood in the rain. Violence is pervasive. Young people call the community "Death Valley." Three years ago, John Eads, whose organization Light of the Village works with at-risk youths in Prichard, invited Father Greg Boyle to see for himself. Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries, a Los Angeles gang intervention and prevention program, was shocked by the poverty and despair.